Would you rather pay for arts or bank bail-outs?

Wednesday 27 October 2010 09:40 BST

Art is not optional. It's essential for dealing with that tricky condition we call human.

When we've been sacked, or chucked, even if we're just going into a gallery to escape the rain, the experience of art can remind us that our own unfortunate circumstances are not all we have — that we are human, and therefore extraordinary. Everyone should be allowed to feel this. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

We believe, don't we, that art is for everyone? That not just posh people's children enjoy ballet — miners' children can, too (there's a film about it — it's called Billy Elliot). The Arts Council works for this equal access — just as the NHS stands for the idea that your healthcare shouldn't be worse because you're poor, the Arts Council thinks you shouldn't get to see better art because you're rich. And now this great aim is under threat. The whole cultural infrastructure of this country is being eroded.

Arts organisations everywhere have been told that their funding is to be cut by 6.9 per cent this year. On top of cuts in local government funding, which hit the regions hardest, this is a bitter blow. But we are concerned that there is more to come. The 2010 Arts Council budget was £468 million. That's 17p per person per week; five per cent of the money lost to non-domicile tax evasion; half the amount spent on arms-trading subsidy; one two-thousandth of the sum used to bail out the banks (when we were doing Enron, we never dealt with numbers that small).

Theatres are not wasteful places. My union is fighting for an actor's minimum wage of £400 per week. It wasn't people on those sort of wages who produced the deficit.

This government has already proved that it knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. But even in purely economic terms, the Treasury is shooting itself in the foot by going after a profitable industry that leads the world. The writer and director of Billy Elliot trained in subsidised theatre; the money paid back in VAT by people buying tickets to watch their work repays that subsidy hundreds of times over.

In 20 years time, where will the next Billy Elliot come from, if young playwrights and directors don't have the opportunities they did?

A further cut would mean companies closing, job losses and homogenisation of work. It would, in fact, reduce that thing so dear to Conservative hearts, choice. The gap is meant to be plugged by philanthropy. But there's a problem: philanthropists want to fund visible success. They don't want to fund training, education, new writing. And these are the things a 6.9 per cent cut will hit first. To state the bleedin' obvious, today's avant garde is tomorrow's mainstream. Any good CEO would classify that 6.9 per cent as R&D and ringfence it. Arts organisations now can't afford to.

We don't have a culture of philanthropy in this country, and it may take years to develop one. Meanwhile, real damage will be done to companies already stretched to breaking point.

I have a question for Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt: where are these new benefactors, and what is the Government doing to encourage them to fill the gap left by the spending cut to the Arts Council?